Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

The problem is that your criteria don't actually prove that something is actually experiencing. They just define the behaviors that you want to call experience.

Actually, I've been pretty clear on this and yet, you consistently insist on building the same strawman. My criteria identifies certain behaviors as necessary consequences of experience. I have not ever equated behavior with experience. I do not define behavior as experience. I do not call any behavior experience. Is that clear enough for you? If you don't have a valid objection, move on - stop repeating the same strawman.

Fine. I will refine my statement. The problem is that your criteria don't prove that something is actually experiencing. They only outline the particular behaviors which you are willing to assume indicate actual experience.

Genkaus wants to take us back to B. F. Skinner. Then again, I'd go back to Aquinas.

Who the fuck is that?

Evidence that you went to college before about 1960, or skipped first-year psych class to chase skirts. Unless you are talking about Aquinas, in which case it's evidence that you went to college before 1250, or skipped first-year philosophy to chase skirts. In either case, pictures or it never happened!

Joking aside, though, Skinner was of the opinion that psychoanalysis was bullshit, and that people should be treated like black boxes: data in, behavior out. And the mechanisms for altering behavior (i.e. learning) were operant: an organism would be rewarded or punished for a behavior, and the number of trials, degree of punishment or reward, etc. could be analyzed to arrive at an effective system of training regardless of the underlying mechanism of the brain and/or the subjective mind. This completely disregards philosophical issues with mind, and gets right down to the science of making things (or people) do want you want them to. It's also very much the starting point for artificial neural networks, which are programmed to use an evolutionary system (random output combined with "punishment" or "reward") to guide a machine to do things it was not directly programmed to do.

In other words, Skinner is the start of a chain of ideas that will eventually arrive at the creation of the Cyberboy 2000.